The Galactus Problem

I've been playing a lot of Marvel Snap lately-I may've mentioned this earlier. But one of the 'upsides' of being sick is that mobile games are easy to manage. And there is a problem facing the game that I'm not sure how they fix, but they clearly are aware of it. 

For those not in the know, Marvel Snap is a game where you play characters with various abilities and power stats in order to control two of three locations. The person with the highest character stats at two of the three locations and the end of six rounds, wins. The locations change each game, so there's a lot of potential variety about what might be good in any given situation. 

Galactus flips this on its head by destroying two of the three locations, making only one matter. Usually when a player gets Galactus on the board, the game is over; there is nothing the opponent can do about the fact that their entire board just got wiped and since the Galactus player's follow up is usually Knull, that's it. Effectively, Galactus turns a game about three locations into one location. 

The first problem: Galactus is unfun. A little unfun is actually important in any game because it helps keep things from getting out of hand. But Galactus creates a kind of unfun that starts to break the metagame down: can you stop the Galactus deck, or not? So you get two kinds of decks; Galactus decks/anti-Galactus decks. 

Which is fine-if it is in little doses. A little unfun is important. 

The problem is that Galactus players play it because it's reliable; if their opponent doesn't have an answer, it's a way to climb the ranks no matter how slowly. It is good to stick with a deck that consistently wins.

But as someone who has had to face Galactus decks multiple times a day, because I'm in the trenches of people trying to rank up I am here to tell you; it isn't any fun to play against. I have two decks that I get to play now and both of them are effectively anti-Galactus tech decks. 

This is out of twenty possible decks I could be playing. Instead of getting to see a lot of wild interactions and a variety of different decks, I see the same play pattern time after time and that is boring. 

Unfortunately, this leads to the second problem: Galactus is necessary. Without the threat of having the game's win condition entirely broken, there is a huge encouragement to build the biggest "go-wide" decks players can build. Flood the zone and call it good, because it's pretty easy to get around locations that have restrictions on what can be there. I think the game devs are smart enough to know that this is a problem and Galactus was their solution to it, as poorly designed as I think it was. 

However, now we're stuck with this: I'm facing multiple Galactus players per day so the "little unfun" element becomes 'frequently unfun' and frequently unfun starts to impact the experience people have overall. 

I don't want to see a game without Galactus though: I understand that would open up a whole other box of problems. But it definitely hampers my enjoyment and turns a game I was enjoying a lot into one that feels grindy as hell.  

There's another element to this though; oversaturation. The TL:DR of that video is that if you're playing in the 85th+ ranks, nobody plays Galactus because they've already got a high rank and the deck is easy to beat/doesn't level you up anymore. Players at that level are ready. 

But if you're in the midrange, everyone is playing Galactus, because that is, however grindy, the way to climb out of it. Of course, most people playing are going to be in the midrange, thus their experience is going to reflect a lot more Galactus than there might actually be. 

I still think the card presents a problem but as with most of these things, the problem likely rests in the enablers-Electro, Wave-than in the end result. So it'll be interesting to see how they work with this, especially since the new season started today, and Nebula seems very, very good. Not good enough to dethrone Galactus, but a challenge unto herself.